How to transition material version in a Form 4 tank

Support & Troubleshooting
1

What is the reasonable process for transitioning a resin from a sunset version to the next supported version without keeping a stable of “transit” tanks in reserve and wasting the last few hundred millilitres of the old resin?

Example: I have a tank with Tough 2000 V1.1. I make production parts on it and I can make builds that use very small amounts of resin (e.g. full plate is 70 ml and I can cut that to suit). My bottle runs out but I have half a litre of V1.1 resin or so in my tank. I can’t use all that resin in one print and now (or at some point) I need to switch over to Tough 2000 V2.

I now can’t start a print even though there is 500 ml of V1.1 in the tank because there is 0 ml in the bottle - the machine / Preform are against this. I find a hack that wastes time but allows a print to proceed - add weight to the bottle and the machine takes agonisingly long after I tell it to ignore the slow resin release error to give me the option to ignore the whole issue and proceed with the print. Why isn’t that override somewhere? I know I have plenty of resin in the tank for my print.

At some point, a print won’t be successful but I will still have non-negligible (and costly) perfectly usable resin in the tank. What are my options?

A) If I am happy to mix versions (is it ok to mix V1.1 and V2 Tough 2000? Formlabs doesn’t make it easy to compare the .fps settings for two resins but looking at copy-edit versions of the 0.1mm default profiles suggests they are significantly different) can I just reprogram the tank without emptying it and start?

B) If I am not happy to mix resins and I can live with the hack and lag of adding weight to the empty bottle then waiting for the opportunity to override the warnings, I can make a copy of the V1.1 profile and set the Resin Level Threshold to 1 mm (or as low as 0 mm if I enable Open Materials Mode? Does this need the machine to have that license paid if I am using it with FL resins?) and then keep printing until I can’t print any more V1.1 plates. Then I have to decant the remaining V1.1, cure it in the Cure V2(?) to safely dispose of it and then reprogram the tank?

The transition of materials is not frequent but is a reality of the FL ecosystem and the price and environmental aspects of the switchover are real concerns for users like me. Please could FL support chime in here with what they imagine users are doing in this kind of scenario? And could the community give me what their process is for resin version changes?

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Hello my friend @smerrett, I had exactly the same concern as you. In my case, it was with a clear resin. Unfortunately, it will be quite difficult for you to find a post from FormLabs related to this, and when you do find one, they will discourage you from mixing resins. Usually, the guidance is not to mix them because it “probably won’t work” or because “the chemical composition of the resins is not mixable.”

But as I mentioned, I had the same challenge as you with Clear V4.1 resin. I simply reprogrammed my tank (which was already full of Clear V4 resin) and started the print. I didn’t even check the parameters of each resin to see if they were as different as you smartly did. Depending on the geometry of the part you’re going to print (simple or with a higher risk of failure), the printing parameters won’t have that much impact, and after post-curing everything will be fine, but you can still change these parameters considering the version that needs more “energy” / time to cure.

Anyway, I’ll leave the link of my full post here. Good luck, partner!!

Mixing Clear V4 and V4.1 - Projects & Prints - Formlabs Community Forum

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Honestly, I’ve always just transitioned by either pouring in new resin and printing with the old profile, or reprogramming the tank and just transitioning with the new resin. You can get a good guess on which way you need to go based on the exposure settings in PSE. I haven’t had issues this far.

Of course Formlabs will never suggest this, but that’s what I’ve done and will probably do with Tough 2000 once I run out of V1.1 and move to V2.

Your mileage may vary, and I’d recommend doing tests to make sure the mechanical properties still like up with what you need or expect from the material.

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@smerrett, the resins you are referring to have different formulations so they should not be mixed. When you’re done with V1.1 and is ready to move to V2, you can clean out and reprogram the tank (check out this article).